About

The Medium / Translating the Metalanguage

In physics, a wave is an oscillation accompanied by a transfer of energy that travels through a medium. On stage, the medium is a momentary collision between several languages. Their sum creates a meta-medium, a fictive reality.

Like a wave propagate through a medium, a piece of art is an unusual language proposing an uncanny reality. In this reality, an oracle is revealed, a pathway for a message to pass through. In this suggested reality, all participants should function as simultaneous interpreters.

The task of the translator is to transport details back and forth, ask for validations and reorganise the given data in a new sensible matter. The task of the artist is to translate abstract ‘metaphysical’ ideas into their most accurate formation in the suggested reality.

As a theater maker and choreographer who is also a Sign Language interpreter, I love to be found in the in-between spaces language and dance can form together.

In my eyes, the art of theater, as the meta-medium of the now, should always invent new languages and with them, the theater maker should ask questions about their true source, the ‘meta-language’.

I believe the theater maker should tell stories, form riddles and use language in order to transcend beyond it. In our post Brecht era, cinema puts theater in risk. If theater won’t trigger the entertained mind, it might loose its validity.

In traditional theater, drama is being charged in a dialogue, between two actors. In performance-art, it may be that the drama is happening between the performer and the spectator. On the other side of the spectrum, dance, as a self-reflective type of art, can mainly talk about the moving body. Therefore its drama is non-lingual and rather internal . In the past century, dance have allowed theater to enter its arenas and redesign their boundaries, but it still didn’t say its last non-verbal word…

Can it be that performance-art is the love-child of dance and theater?

When the boundaries between dance and theater are merging is when a new type of performance-art is born. One that is placing the drama each time in a different hidden location.

Like a wave is a disturbance that propagates through space and time, performance-art should be an up-to-date aesthetic collision between several mediums, interweaving new meanings into one’s mind.

When languages truly collide, mobility becomes fluidity.This is when language wants tell us something greater about itself. When the ‘How’ and the ‘What’ become one, the medium becomes the message.

the progressive wave is a new wave of performance art, exploring relations between languages, cultures and identities.